Music lessons are a waste of time for most kids

[Baldrick23]

I don't mean this too horribly but when I hear that Jonny is a brilliant musician and has grade 7 aged 14 and might go to music school I die a bit inside.

So Im shaped by personal experience here. I did all the grades on the cello by 12 and was a decent cellist and a music scholar. But what parents need to understand is a couple of things. Unless you have grade eight at about 8 (or very soon after starting if later) then you aren't going to be a concert soloist. Even if you do you probably aren't going to be a concert soloist. I wouldn't even have probably made it to be a decent cellist in an orchestra earning 30k for a tricky life touring and barely able to afford anything. So everyone should remenber music is just for fun. None of the kids are going to make it. Just find out how talented you need to be "just" to be a music teacher at a school.

I cant say this out loud at the school gate so I'm saying it here!

Oh and if they love sport get them private 1 to 1 coaching even if they arent the next messi. Just as worthwhile. Forcing talentless musicians to scrape their way humourlessly to grade 2 is awful for everyone involved

@Reugny @LittleDarlingStar yes was tongue in cheek 😂. Explains why my knowledge of science is atrocious.

OP was not talking about popular music as it doesn't need hard training anyway.

I'm currently taking jazz lessons and working my way through the Great American Songbook and your assertion that popular music doesn't need hard training couldn't be more wrong.

I've spent my life playing classical music. Someone puts a page full of notes in front of me and I play them and tweak how I play them according to the conductor's whim. That's relatively easy.

Learning jazz, I suddenly have to know music theory. I have to understand chord extensions and song structure and harmonic progressions in order to improvise, where I make the music up as I play it. The whole of pop works in this way. You can't write a good pop song without understanding harmony and form.

Hmmm, do you not have to know music theory to play classical music? That sounds very strange to me to be honest.

Jazz is not popular music either, but I see your point about improvisation. Pop is not about improvisation though, it's about "predictability" - so yes, in a way it has to be written along the most predictable chords and progressions for a "general listener" to enjoy familiar patterns. Unlike Stravinsky, for example, whose works are a pain for many. Or the horrors of Schoenberg 😁

Still it doesn't require years of training as an instrumentalist (or composer for that matter). If you listen to viral TikTok songs - Toxic for example - you'll see what I mean.

Few pop/rock songwriters had years of tedious classical training - look at Beatles, Queen, Pink Floyd, you name it. How did they write catchy pop songs without studying theory? Interestingly, many happened to have studied art instead - Barrett, Lennon, Mercury were art students. Some do have classical training, but it is by no means necessary. Whereas if you look at 1st violins at say NYO - with few exceptions, they have almost invariably started at 4-6, some are children of musicians so "started" before birth. This is no coincidence. BTW these are children whom previous posters called abnormal weirdos drilled from nappies.

Anyway, the thread has diverged too far from OP :)

I find your post very interesting as I'm currently reading a sociological paper that claims that art/music cannot actually be "consumed passively", the act of perception has to mirror the act of creation which means the audience has to make an active effort to be able to enjoy a work of art/music. So you can be middle class but secretly dislike complex art/music as it kind of imposes an imperative of mental/emotional effort you don't necessarily want to do. Just another perspective on the current crisis - the author is not British so I guess the situation is not exclusive to us.

Dopamine triggers of SM are also a vast area of research of course. But this is a different topic though for me personally it's one of the most interesting things.

You don't need to know music theory to play the notes literally written on the page in front of you, although it can help to know what your "job" is within the harmony. You need to know music theory to compose beyond an elementary level.

Jazz largely involves improvising over a preset chord sequence. If I'm playing over Take The A Train, the chords are the ones used for the tune. I have to understand those chords to improvise.

With a pop song, we see many of the same types of chord sequence that we see in jazz, like circles of fifths, altered plagal cadences, and ii-V-I (pronounced "two five one") progressions. To compose these songs, you need to understand these progressions.

The years of training for professional musicians is so that they have total control over their instruments, in any key, and can focus on playing emotively and balancing within the ensemble instead of thinking about what finger to put down next. Fundamentally, the point of music is to make the listener feel something, and professional classical musicians have to do that based on a piece of paper with some dots and lines on it, written by someone who is often long-dead. But, jazz musicians and pop musicians also need total control over their instruments, to invent the music as they go along, and they need to understand music theory to do that.

Carol Kaye, bass guitarist with the "wrecking crew", was jazz trained and contributed to hundreds of pop records including the Beach Boys "Pet Sounds", improvising many of her lines.

Yes @MaidOfAle I understand what you mean as DC is learning both jazz and classical, and generally within Gypsy music tradition improvisation is one of the key skills. But my examples of great pop/rock musicians with hardly any training still stand. Though they probably "feel" it with some sixth sense without formal training...

Which actually takes me back to @LittleDarlingStar - decolonisation is a trendy topic, but actually I don't think classical training and folk tradition are mutually exclusive. At least it doesn't work like this in our case where DC's classical training has always been firmly rooted in our ethnic musical tradition.

I'm currently reading a sociological paper that claims that art/music cannot actually be "consumed passively.

😂How did I know that you were going to reply this?! It was predictable.

the act of perception has to mirror the act of creation which means the audience has to make an active effort to be able to enjoy a work of art/music

Is that form the paper? It sounds pretentious and is rather inaccurate IMO, perhaps a level 7 dissertation?

So you can be middle class but secretly dislike complex art/music as it kind of imposes an imperative of mental/emotional effort you don't necessarily want to do

Why should middle class people be secretive about not liking classical? It sounds all so snobbish😴

Ds is a pop/theatre keyboard player. I would argue that the level of training for required to play a piece such as Rosanna or the music of Jason Robert Brown is comparable to classical players. (I mean play them properly, the drum part of Rosanna is notorious).

When you listen to a great pop song most of what makes the song great is the session players & orchestrations/band arrangments. Toto were primarily session players, Elton John (classically trained) has some fantastic orchestrators and band members). My son is currently being hired to play/arrange/orchestrate pop songs for other musicians

@Ubertomusic They may not have had long music training but they have other interests and skills. So for example in Queen John Deacon and Brian May studied electronics and physics respectively plus with their hobbies as teenagers showed they both had strong practical interests in acoustics as well as music. Without the practical interest in acoustics, music training and creativity Queen as a group wouldn't have been able to produce loads of hits.

There are some classically trained musicians who are/were pop stars e.g. Alicia Keys, Burt Bacharach but also trained in other music genres.

Also it is sometimes hidden until you look for it the fact that some artists/producers/song writers actually have classical music training.

Hundreds and hundreds of millions of views, mega viral on TikTok m.youtube.com/watch?v=Mvaosumc4hU&pp=ygUQdG94aWMgYm95d2l0aHVrZQ%3D%3D

Where is orchestration? Where are session musicians?

This is what's called popular music now.

It might be what you call popular music. As with all genres, there is good and bad, talented and not so talented. (Incidentally though Boywithuke is classically trained)

I will direct you to artists such as The Last Dinner Party, Chappell Roan, English Teacher (grads from my son's conservatoire) Lottery Winners, even Dua Lipa (there are a lot of things that go into her seemingly simple bangers).

I never said there was none, merely that it was not absolutely mandatory for success in pop.

It's not me - it's millions of hits that call it popular, by definition "music that people en masse consume". That's why jazz is not "popular music", it's very niche these days.

Dua Lipa and Taylor Swift - yes, and TS is classically trained.

Boy dropped out of his training before it got serious.

You can get millions of hits of a video where you fake falling over. It doesn't mean that person is a talented actor. It's short lived and people move onto something else.

Dua Lipa apparently has some classical training.

Oh but people move onto something else every two minutes or so these days. It's only us oldies who get stuck on this topic 😂

I was talking about training, not talent. You can measure training quantitatively, in hours and years, and you can measure success in hits leading to monetisation. But talent is elusive and not quantitative so I didn't mean talent at all.

Apparently the "artist" has had some classical training.

He dropped out very early.

Unfortunately for us. 😂

Unfortunately for us. 😂

I find that the youngsters are quite discerning. They watch these stupid videos on tik tok to laugh at them but the artists they follow, buy tickets for etc etc are the ones with substance.

I came across that song when a very musical and classically trained child auditioned with it - so no, they don't just laugh at these videos, they often take them seriously. The creators have massive followers base too.

So referring back to OP, it is actually possible to become a "soloist" on SM these days.

I’ve not listened to the song so cannot say if it is shutout or not. But those who sustain a career usually have some level of training

But looking at the current UK singles chart I would say that the majority of songs on there are from artists (and I include the writers/musicians involved behind the scenes) who have studied and practised their craft in whatever form for many years)

Take a pop/rock drummer for example. Do you know that they spend many, many hours practising rudiments to get them right and to be able to use them in creative ways. Its very similar to playing classical scales.

Yes jazz is quite a skill based genre. Interestingly its based on the skills of an early keyboardist who was given the cello part with chord figures underneath and told to get on with it. Figured bass still crops up in the higher theory grades and is an essential requirement in the harpsichord practicals (not that many people take those.